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War in their worlds

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieFourth Estate £14.99 pp437THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS by Kiran DesaiH Hamilton £16.99 pp326 Both these post-colonial writers have well-received debut novels behind them, and now re-enter the lists with stories of unrest and ethnic rivalry in recent history. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deals with the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s. The main characters are twin rich-kid sisters: Olanna (beautiful and academic) who lives with a "revolutionary" maths lecturer, and Kainene (ugly and business-minded) who rather daringly shacks up with Richard, a British writer. Olanna "was like the stone that lay right below a gushing spring, rubbed smooth by years and years of sparkling water, and looking at her was similar to finding that stone . . . " It's nice writing, but you can't really have years of water, and there's something rather clunky about "similar to", which is put there to avoid